- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:36:16 +0100
- To: W3C OWL Working Group <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
I propose that we put the attributes into "no namespace" rather than into whatever namespace we pick. Rationale: Unprefixed attributes do not inherit the default namespace. This is a deliberate design decision of XML namespaces. The idea is that bare attribute names which are *only* used in a specific vocabulary are sufficiently disambiguated by their parent element. Attributes that are intended to *cross* vocabularies (such as xml:lang or xlink attributes) *are* encouraged to be put into a namespace (for obvious reasons). The advantage of keeping the attributes namespaceless is that, with a default namespace declaration, OWL/XML will not need *any* prefixes for elements and attributes. Frankly, this is a huge authoring and reading win. It also means one can *just* use QNames for uri abbreviation (assuming we allow QNames in attribute content...subject of a future post!). My understanding is that no namespace attributes are the preferred design in this case anyway. We don't intend for these attributes to be used anywhere but in our vocabulary and it's pretty clear that no one would want them :) Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Thursday, 28 August 2008 12:33:45 UTC